Rumors circulating that Novell is going to kill off its popular Linux desktop lines are completely false. [However,] Novell is making one large strategic change. The GNOME interface is going to become the default interface on both the SLES and Novell Linux Desktop line. KDE libraries will be supplied on both, but the bulk of Novell's interface moving forward will be on GNOME. "The entire KDE graphical interface and product family will continue to be supported and delivered on OpenSuSE."

I have the same problems with KDE, it simple sucks, crash on me all the time, the UI is to confusing and the applications are useless, KOffice its a monument to mediocricy and Konqueror its a slap on my face.

And no, amaroK won't make me more productive (geez, is just a music player and album collector for then lazzy ones).

So if any KDE developer is reading this you better fix the mess you have in KDE 4 because right now is pathetic.

Care to explain what crashes ? Have you investigated whether the code generated by the C++ compiler you are using actually generated WORKING CODE ? It's a known fact that C++ support within GCC was pretty poor in the past. Most of the time when I read about KDE crashes it most of the time isn't a KDE problem, it's mostly a problem with GCC generating bad code or people overusing CXXFLAGS or whatever.

> the UI is to confusing

I made exactly the oposite experience with the GUI. The GUI is consistent, the toolbar options, features and objects are similar across all KDE applications that use a toolbar. The window components are great too and it's easy to tell people where to find something to have the settings changed to match their needs. At least its much easier than telling someone to use gconftool-2.

> and the applications are useless

What applications are you refering to ? Most applications on the KDE side that I tried and used are quite mature applications. But then it also depends on your needs. I do assume that you are a hobbiest user who doesn't know much about the things that students, science or corporates needs. So I can tell you that programs like Kivio, TaskJuggler, Umbrello, Kstars, Koffice, Kedu, KTechlab and many more are quite mature and great applications. I tried to find aequivalents for GNOME for quite a long time but always failed to find anything that comes close to the software offered for KDE.

When I was student at the university I needed to draw some UML stuff (colaboration diagrams, class diagrams, use case diagrams) and all the stuff around it and DIA which is the only existing application that time, gave me a lot of problems by permanently crashing, by giving really ugly and bad results, by causing a lot of errors during loading and saving etc. I consider that stuff to not to be corporate ready. Not to speak about DIA's printing issues - but that already was enough to get lost with DIA. Umbrellos and Kivio saved my day and they looked and felt the same as known commercial high graded counterparts found for Microsoft Windows.

Also now as IT-Projectmanager I rely on software that simply works, here again Planner comes into my mind which exists for GNOME but compared to TaskJuggler or (MS.Project) it's just a toy and immature. I had to switch over again to KDE to use TaskJuggler to get my work done correctly.

So honestly by all good will, I can not see how KDE offers crappy applications. Either you are quite clueless troll or you simply don't know what's really required in daily business. At least I earn money not from the desktop but the work I give to my customers and I can only accomplish and finish this work by using at least reliable and good software and KDE offers plenty of them. They are not just great applications, their developers do their best to improve the things and the improvements happen in a short time due to the great object oriented background that KDE offers. Great applications to be developed in short time.

> KOffice its a monument to mediocricy

Again I can't follow your critics here and your ramblings aren't backed up with facts either, just random bullshit generated comments. Of course KOffice is far from perfect but the KDE developers do their best (even in these hard times) to offer the best possible solution for the best desktop there is.

> and Konqueror its a slap on my face.

For something you haven't contributed a line code and for something you don't need to pay for you seem to be shouting out quite energic.

Konqueror is basicly nothing else than just a Window (a User Interface) to the great KIOSlave modell beneath KDE. KIOSlaves as well as KParts are one of the biggest strengths that KDE offers. Modules written and easily shareable for other things. Konqueror makes use of the KIOSlave and KParts model and provides a Window for the most common used things such as FTP, WEB, Filebrowsing. But it's just a matter of seconds to access other things such as POP3, SQL and other things from within it. Something Nautilus will never be able to do because it's not laid out to do this kind of tasks (while, it doesn't even do the basic tasks good enought at all).

So seriously, I can't understand the audience here. We can have all disputes we want, we can disagree each others and thats all ok. But I am a bit fed up about the FUD spreading and the false facts that some people like to manifest. This is simply ignorant, wrong and plain idiotic.

At the end KDE and GNOME people are sitting in the same boat (not that just that one SUSE developer got fired, but also plenty of GNOME developers got fired as well - for really essential and critical GNOME components).

ick umbrello and kivio. Kivio was straight up useless and umbrello would spontaneously crash on my slackware system. It makes me wonder if there was this much crying when slackware dropped gnome. It made me switch over to debian. I think slackware dropping gnome hurts WAY more then suse dropping kde. I might try dropline or some alternative but ill hold off on that.

yes the UI for most of the kde toolbar is exceptionally cluttered. Some people like it, some people absolutely hate it. There is no other DE which just throws a barrage of icons at your face then kde.

as for kde crashing, I mean it happens to me. It aint super frequent but a lot of things would tip it off, from kscreensaver to kopete. Gnome never crashed for me unless i run xcompmgr. The number of crashing was the same compared to running kde with kcompmgr......which was really high (someone fix it!!)

When it came to looks. KDE would lliterally make me barf until i did a good bit of tweaking. Had to custom build my own icon set cause the ones that were out were either for 3 year olds or OSX ripoffs....or gceanzze.... those are some good icons but they are only really for mime types. Then i needed kpager2, then mtaskbar, of course the only viable theme was baghira (blatant OSX ripoff but only thing i can stand). At that point, i could at most make running kde bearable, but it got a bit to complex.

I have successfully found gtk-gnome applications that is on par or better then kde applications (and i do a lot of different things on linux). And some of these mono projects are looking really good. From my testing monoUML simply destroys umbrello as does monoDevelop does KDevelop (although KDevelop have more tools here and there). And as i mentioned before i love using beagle and luminosity. Since my computer is a speed machine i use them with no problem. and i like gaim, totem, graveman, bluefish, evolution, and gedit and im still stuck in xmms world even with all the songs i got =).

Although Konqueror is nice, I will honestly tell the kde team to simply give up on koffice. And i hate that monolithic package system. Thank god they now have options to install by app, because there is so much crap that i dont need when using those packages.

Well umm in the end.... i like gnome. leave me alone, because i dont feel any less inferior or productive then the kde camp. Suse picked gnome.....leave them alone because they feel just content with the decision..........or else they wouldnt have made it. There is a reason where they are where theyre at........and you guys are where u are at. Of course the company is not doing spectacular at the moment, but they have focus and bring in their revenue and have way more people that know more than u.

It sucks when a company cant make a damn decision without some crackpot useless flame war starting up. I didnt see the gnome camp spewing this crap when kde was the default for suse..... it would be best if the kde campe return the favor.